Absolutely. Google search is now my choice ONLY when I want to buy something, and it's likely to be from someone who'd advertise through google. Otherwise you've got to go a long way through the results, and then you get to just junk - pretty useless.
Google maps is just as bad - other than street names and a few "public" places, the only locations that show up seem to be those paying to appear. Given how many (most) businesses google has details on, it's obvious that maps is filtering out non-advertisers.
So google is no longer a search engine, or a maps provider - it's degraded to be a small-time "yellow-pages" advertising directory. Sad really.
They probably do, then give themselves a nice round of applause. They're getting rid of their (unprofitable) discerning users, and keeping all the (profitable) naive users. On average, this increases the effectiveness of their ads and decreases costs. It's a big win for Google's customers (not you).
I've run into this a lot as well. If I'm looking up a place that catches my interest, 9 times out of 10 I'm *not* interested in hotel rooms or flights there. One Firefox search bar feature that I dearly love is that I can quickly and easily override my default search engine.
Or perhaps Google is crap enough. I no longer find anything useful when the search term overlaps with something for sale.
Even Wikipedia search is better in that case, and I skip directly to it.